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Commenting on the objection to the allegation that there would be jail time for the uninsured:

Since you've read up, where does the bill say the penalty is jail time for not paying the fine for failing to get insurance? (Please cite the name of the measure and section.)

By the way, in the Senate Finance Committee the Chairman's Mark of America's Healthy Future Act of 2009 (Baucus' version, recently released) is 220 pages in length. So either you're a fast reader or you're talking about something else.

for a major bill 220 pages is pretty short and its been out for about 2 weeks.....as far as if i would have read it or not, you realize Baucus is my senator and that i run two newspapers? it is kinda my job to keep up on what the guy is doing.......

and what happens when you dont pay a fine, especially one imposed by the feds?

So although you say that there will be jail time for those who don’t pay the fine, you can’t point to anywhere in the bill that calls for jail time. All you can do is make an unfounded assertion that any violation of federal law results in jail time. The fact is that there are laws requiring people to do things or prohibiting people from doing things that have no penalties associated with them. But before anyone starts thinking about not paying the fine, the IRS is going to collect it.

the exact penalty may not be on the books but a judge can dole out the penalty if you broke the law that is on the books....you really do live in your own lil world.....claim i couldnt have read a bill in 10 days though i get paid to keep up on these things cause its my business though you wouldnt have doubted me if i had read a 500 page novel in that time as can most here and there will be a higher word count in the novel....claim i cant know what a punishment is going to be when i cover local, state and federal court cases....

guess what its my job and i get paid to keep an eye on this kind of stuff.......it aint a hobby.....i also understand school law and school finance better than most school board members in the state, i also have a great understanding of the state and federal open meeting laws and the Montana Freedom of Information Act....just cause im not a lawyer doesnt mean i dont understand it. and cant reference cases that have gone through the courts off the top of my head. i spend good chunks of my days keeping tabs on current court cases going through the various levels of court.....

Tropics I'm the one who made the initial unfounded assertion there'd be jail time for not paying the fines. How much time who knows. How long are people usually jailed for tax violations 3 - 5? True they aren't talking about this on any of the news, think of the panic it would cause from people already stretched to their financial limits? I should think it would make the imaginary "death panel panic" Fox news whipped up seem tame in comparison.

Looking at it from a practical standpoint if you don't pay your taxes or can't pay this fine because you're unemployed (but would not owe anything except for this $1000 fine for not having insurance you can't afford) what happens is that the IRS tries to collect. If you can't pay the IRS you don't get sent to Disneyland for a vacation. Although if they start jailing people cos they can't pay the no-insurance fine, they may have to acquire Disneyland to house them all. lol

The companies, lawmakers and IRS all seem to think poor people aren't really poor we just live this way so we can hide our money in ammo boxes buried in the back yard or in our offshore banking accounts. Truth be told they're the only ones with any money to do that sort of stuff with.

Rattler, maybe you should read my post again. I didn’t claim that you didn’t read the bill. I said that if you read it, you must be a fast reader. So apparently you are a fast reader. You seem to think that judges can impose penalties for any violation of law. They can do it only if the law prescribes penalties because judges are bound to follow the law. If the law doesn’t prescribe penalties, they are not able to impose them. You admit that penalties are not on the books.

Swords, the fine is not a tax, so penalties for tax violations don’t apply.

JB, you are arguing against yourself. You say that the use of emergency rooms is unnecessarily high, driving up the cost of health care, because people without health care insurance use it. (Hospitals have to treat people who go to the ER, whether they can pay for it or not.) The whole point of Obama’s health care reform is to insure more people so they get their illnesses treated early so that they don’t get so severely ill that they have to go to the ER. You seem to dislike the idea of socialism. Did you drive to work or drive to the market in the past few days, or use the bus? If so, the roads that you used were likely built by government. Those were socialist roads that you were using, and you're probably not going to stop using them. Take the good ideas from socialism and use them.

In the U.S., a whopping 18% of the gross domestic product is spent on health care. Yet 46 million people are uninsured. Other developed countries spend only 12% of their GDP on health care. Furthermore, they insure everyone, AND they have better health outcomes. Americans are paying too much for too little. That’s why we need health care reform.

In the U.S., a whopping 18% of the gross domestic product is spent on health care. Yet 46 million people are uninsured. Other developed countries spend only 12% of their GDP on health care. Yet they insure everyone, AND they have better health outcomes. Americans are paying too much for too little. Thatís why we need health care reform.

FINALLY someone that sees the big picture. Paying for it never has been an issue, priorities as to where money from the GDP goes is the problem.

alot of the laws started with no set punishment guidelines, its only after the laws went into effect and judges and juries were giving widely different punishments for the same crime that the standards were put....there are all kinds of crimes with no set punishment on the books, usually minor crimes, that a judge uses their discretion on how to punish the individual...i aint saying your going to do years in a federal pen for not doing it but i can defiantly see yah sitting for 30 days....

250 pages in the 5 days i actually did it aint much, thats 50 pages a day and they aint cramming lots of words on a page, i used to finish off a 300 some page novel in a day and a half when i wasnt working....given right now im nursing a back injury ive got lots of time at work sitting at my desk to read....

will say that the committe on Baucus's bill voted down an admendment to it today that would have required the final bill in the committee to be released for the public to read 72 hours before they voted on it.....apparently its so important they cant take an extra 3 days to allow the general public to read it.